The following list outlines ideal plant candidates for succession planting and the maximum you can accomplish with each crop. However, this is only a guide. Don’t be afraid to alter the tips and recommendations for each plant according to your specific needs and priorities.
With this said, you can lean on the guidelines provided here with full confidence, knowing that they will guarantee that you have the particular vegetable you’re planting throughout the year. Otherwise, draw up a customized planting schedule if you only want it at a particular time in the year and not full-time.
With this said, here are 19 plant candidates and what you should do with them to ensure high yield and quality:
1) Lettuce
You can use either seeds or transplants to grow lettuce. Seed-grown lettuce, such as mesclun, is commonly grown in rows that you can remove and re-grow a few times. Transplanted lettuce can be grown to produce full heads like store-bought, seeded lettuce can.
For a continual yield, both kinds require weekly or biweekly planting. You can grow cut greens from seed in mid-April to mid-August and transplant complete heads starting from late April to early May to early August.
Some gardeners prefer to transplant a few seeds and plants to a different location at the same time, resulting in two generations of lettuce and two kinds of salad greens. If you believe this strategy will work for you, you can adopt it.
It’s best to pick out the chopped lettuce once it turns bitter in the intense summer heat, supplement the soil with compost, and plant a different crop. If your objective is to have fresh lettuce all year long, it should be easy enough to accomplish if you’re prompt in replanting it once you complete harvesting. You can even buy a few lettuce plants, keep them in pots in a shaded area, and plant a couple each week. You could also sow your lettuce in pots or trays and use the same procedure.
It is best to grow various lettuce types instead of just one variety. Grow cold-tolerant lettuce for springtime and fall plantings and heat-tolerant lettuce for mid-summer plantings. This way, you will have an extended harvest window, enabling you to enjoy fresh lettuce for a longer time.
2) Cilantro
Cilantro’s growth patterns are extremely similar to lettuce. Cilantro experiences bolting —when a plant grows up to a certain point and then goes to seed.
In the intense heat of summer, cilantro will bolt more rapidly, but in the cool fall weather—even early winter—it will remain available to harvest for multiple weeks. It’s thus a good idea to time your cilantro to ensure it is ready for harvest before the solstice on June 21st and then plant some more after that.
Like lettuce, you can grow it from seed or transplant it. Like lettuce, too, it’s quite easy to conduct both in tandem, providing you with two generations of produce. Cilantro seed is coriander, so if you like its flavor, it will certainly have a use in your kitchen.
It’s important to understand that there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop cilantro from bolting. However, it is possible to slow it down by growing it in a partially shaded spot in the middle of summer when the heat is at its fiercest.
3) Dill
Dill may be handled similarly to cilantro, and dill seed heads - like coriander seeds - have culinary value, so allowing a portion of the dill patch to go to seed is perfectly fine. You can use the dill seed heads in pickles. You can also let them self-sow or preserve the fully-dried seeds for replanting in a paper bag.
4) Basil
For best results, plant basil multiple times (basically staggered planting, which we’ve already covered). You can clip plants to inhibit flowering, but freshly replanted basil plants usually have the finest flavor. Basil is a plant that thrives in the heat. Plant only when soil temperatures are firmly in the upper 50s, generally the latter week of May or the first week of June. The flavor of basil will be at its greatest immediately before it begins to blossom.
5) Cucumbers, zucchini, cantaloupes, and summer squash
Cucumbers, zucchini, cantaloupes, and summer squash yield their highest possible quality when thoroughly tended to. For the home gardener, a single plant or two —of any of them— is generally sufficient, but by growing it 2 to 3 times, spread out, you guarantee that the quality will always be excellent.
If you live in a warm climate area, June 1st (or the final week of May), July 1st, and July 15th are the ideal dates to plant these. Doing this will ensure you have a steady supply of excellent-quality veggies for an extended window. Just be sure to pick out and destroy any older pest or disease-prone plants.
After taking out the older, less healthy, less robust plants, you’ll find that pest issues will significantly decrease. You can compost these pest-and-disease-prone plants, but only if you’re sure your compost will get really hot and be under careful management. You can also utilize that extra, opened up planting space to grow a fast-growing crop like herbs, lettuce, greens, onions, or fennel, which will be done growing and out of the way by the time you want to plant a fresh round of these veggies.
6) Arugula, mustards & other salad cutting greens
Weekly or biweekly seeded or transplanted arugula, mustards, and other salad greens will produce the best results. You can sow a small amount of these crops adjacent to the transplanted plants, so you have two generations at the same time, allowing you an extended harvest. This lets you have lesser volumes arrive at different times, ensuring you don’t get overwhelmed by your harvest.
7) Broccoli
Broccoli provides you with multiple alternatives. It grows best when transplanted, and you can plant it three times in the spring and three times in late summer to ensure a continual yield.
For spring plantings, go with late April, early May, and mid-May, while for fall plants, go with early August, mid-August, and early September. The crops can be left in the ground to develop side shoots after you’ve harvested the full heads.
8) Green Beans
Green beans are at their tastiest when they are young and fresh. Green bean seed is very expensive, so it makes sense to rip out your old plants and use the seeds to make fresh plantings regularly. Smaller, multiple plantings will also mean that you won’t feel bogged down picking beans for hours on end. The best time to sow a fresh round of seeds is after the first generation has grown to about 6 inches tall.
9) Cabbage, Boc Choi, and cauliflower
You can have staggered plantings of Boc Choi, Cabbage, and Cauliflower. Cabbage withstands heat well and could be planted every few weeks from late April to early August. Cauliflower and Bok Choi are not quite as heat tolerant as cabbage, and you should plant them around the same time as broccoli (see above). Row covers, such as Reemay, are very effective in preventing flea beetles from destroying your young transplants. We shall cover row covers in detail in chapter 9.
10) Spinach
Spinach is another heat-resistant plant you can plant numerous times in the spring and late summer. Tended with a little straw mulch, it can even overwinter for extremely early spring consumption. You can plant spinach every week from mid-April to early June and then again from early August to mid-September. The final September plantings will be overwintered and ready to eat the following spring. Once the ground has frozen in December when winter is well and truly away, apply straw mulch to the overwintering spinach to ensure steady nourishment of your plants.
11) Carrots, beets, and turnips
You can plant beets, carrots, and turnips from seed every 2 to 3 weeks from mid-April through the third week in July. Carrots grown in the summer are not similar to those grown in the fall, and certain types perform better in the summer than in the fall.
Fall carrots have a sweeter flavor, so you may want to plant a bigger batch in the fall. Fall carrots also have lesser moisture content than summer carrots, so you can store them for the entire duration of winter without worrying about them going bad.
On the other hand, Summer carrots will almost certainly go bad if you store them throughout winter. Most gardeners ignore summer carrots in favor of fall carrots but what’s important is to prioritize what you enjoy eating most. If you prefer summer carrots to fall carrots, then set aside a larger gardening patch for them.
12) Celery and celeriac
Celery and celeriac are slower-growing vegetables that can be transplanted once or twice a week throughout the growing season, from mid-May to early July. These plants require a lot of water, and adding straw mulch to the soil will help keep the moisture uniformly distributed around their roots, ensuring that they grow unperturbed.
13) Bulb fennel and radishes
Bulb Fennel and radishes are quite similar to lettuce in that they’re transplantable every week if you so desire, but they bolt in the summer heat and thrive in the cooler months of the year. It’s best to plant them in late April or early June, and then once again in late August or the first week of September. They can withstand the cold and hold up nicely in the late fall.
Fennel is best transplanted, as opposed to planting from seed. Radishes are grown from seed. Straw mulch is greatly beneficial to fennel as it helps it grow larger roots by facilitating equal moisture around its roots.
14) Corn
Several corn plantings over many weeks are feasible, but a simpler technique is to plant everything at once, but with different corn varieties that mature at different times. The maturity time difference between the early and late variants can be as much as 40 days.
15) Peas
You can transplant peas each passing week of the year, but you will need to do a lot of irrigating, trellising, harvesting, and variety research. It is, nonetheless, doable.
In practice, a home gardener can seed two or three types in late April, with different maturity dates. Planting peas in the fall can lead to successful results, but this is, of course, weather-dependent. If you’re going to plant your peas in the fall, ensure you’re done planting by the middle of August before the cold gets really severe.
The following plant varieties (16-19) are generally planted once a year, but you can stagger the harvests by implementing the succession-planting strategies and methods covered in chapter 3 through 6:
16) Tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers
With tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant — try a few different kinds of each to avoid harvesting everything all at once. Determinate tomatoes will give you a large harvest all at once, which is ideal for folks who can or freeze large batches of tomato sauce. Determinate tomatoes are those that reach a specific height before maturing all at the same time.
On the other hand, indeterminate tomatoes grow continuously until frost arrives, with the fruit ripening progressively from August until the plant is killed by frost or disease. The latter will probably be a better choice for you if you’re a gardener who neither freezes them for tomato sauces nor sells them.
Once the soil warms up, you can transplant your peppers and eggplants, as they do best in warm soil. Typically, this will be in the first two weeks of June. A singular planting is generally more than sufficient, but different varieties will ensure a diverse, staggered, and certainly interesting harvest.
17) Potatoes and onions
Potatoes and onions are usually planted all at once, and having an assortment of varieties with different maturation dates will give you a longer window of fresh produce. Onions and potatoes call for cool and dark conditions for their preservation and will last for longer without going bad in the same. Both onions and potatoes are edible when young —as green onions or new potatoes, respectively. They can be picked, cured, and preserved for consumption all year.
18) Winter squash
Winter squash is yet another crop planted just once a year and then harvested and stored. Before eating, you should cure it for a week or two in a warm storage space.
19) Watermelons and cantaloupes
Watermelons are generally only planted once a year (early June is ideal). On the other hand, you can plant cantaloupes as late as mid-July.
With all these different plants covered, as well as what to do with them when practicing succession planting, the next chapter looks at extending the season and the different tips, tricks, and strategies you can use to prolong your harvesting season so that you enjoy fresh produce over a longer period.
